News for hackers. Stuff that matters.
Re:Racket: Lisp for Learning by nudpiedo on Thursday August 08, 2019 @11:53AM (#20645649)
The UI of an S-Expeession and a compiler transformation parse time transformation is just out of any comparison.

Most of projects wouldn’t even consider writing a loader for a compiler or using a syntax parser. Yet to add which method is more prone to errors.

Re:Racket: Lisp for Learning by sdegutis on Thursday August 08, 2019 @12:18PM (#20645877)
True but there's also things like Sweet.js, and non-s-expression languages have been able to get macros too, such as Elixir. I'm firmly convinced that s-expressions are almost pure novelty with no legitimate benefit.
Re:Racket: Lisp for Learning by aeorgnoieang on Thursday August 08, 2019 @07:45PM (#20650085)
I've been programming in Elixir for a few months now, and I like it a lot, but I found your comment amusing because a lot of Elixir's 'macro expressivity' seems to be due to Erlang using a data structure for its own parsing that can be readily manipulated as 'first class citizen' in itself. That's basically what s-expressions do. Apart from a small number of things that most people otherwise encounter in 'infix' notation, e.g. arithmetic, s-expressions seem to be a radically, and brilliantly, simple form of writing programs in a way that makes meta-programming as simple as possible.

(And, of course, meta-programming is powerful, thus 'dangerous', but there's a lot of things that are only really feasible with it.)